"Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred."
That double pun was authored by Richard Whately, 1787-1863, one-time Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, an appropriate man from whom to quote on this day holy to Christians, either as Easter (most) or Palm Sunday (Orthodox and Oriental).
But that's an excuse. Once there was a famous American punster who was at a banquet in England. Someone asked if it were true that he could make a pun at the drop of a hat. He acknowledge that it was. He was then asked to do so. He asked, "Give me a subject." This being England, someone immediately shouted out "The Queen!" Whereupon he responded "But the Queen is not a subject."
I may not qualify as a pundit, but as my wife knows all too well, I do qualify as a punster. This diary is devoted to my favorite form of what I consider to be humor.
Leaves on the Current (my spouse), it to blame for this. Some time ago, she emailed me - with some trepidation - a link for an op ed that appeared in The New York Times entitled Pun for the Age, by one Joseph Tartakovksy, a student at Fordham Law. It was from this piece that I obtained the opening blockquote. He begins it like this:
THE inglorious pun! Dryden called it the "lowest and most groveling kind of wit." To Ambrose Bierce it was a "form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire." Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan. It is said that Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun. (Some believe he was inclined to extremes.)
He traces the idea of and use of puns through many writers, from famous like Shakespeare, most of whose exemplars are bawdy, to those less known. The definition of pun upon which he operates would probably not include the example of "the Queen is not a subject" because it does not depend upon sound - as he notes in his second paragraph
Addison defined the pun as a "conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense." "Energizer Bunny Arrested! Charged with Battery." No laugh? Q.E.D.
. And often the pun is ephemeral, depending upon the ability of the punster to immediately make a homophonic connection that has some chance of APPEARING humorous, at least to the one uttering it. And as he notes in introducing us to Whately,
The true punster’s mind cycles through homophones in search of a quip the way small children delight in rhymes or experiment babblingly with language.
I resent the word babblingly because I believe there is a skill in hearing in one's mind the possibilities of the language to be able to quickly turn a seemingly innocuous expression - or more often a name - into something that causes an effect.
But due caution, the best response for which a pun-dit (punster) can hope is a groan or, as one of my students last year became famous for demonstrating, a physical reaction equivalent to the groan - C_____ would simply lean over and bang his forehead on his desk.
I find myself very much in tune with this portion of the op ed:
Why do puns offend? Charles Lamb, a notorious punster, explained that the pun is "a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect." Surely puns silence conversation before they animate it. Some stricken with pun-lust sink so far into their infirmity that their minds become trained to lie in wait for words on which to work their wickedness. They are the scourge of dinner tables and the despised prolongers of office meetings, some letting fly as instinctively as dogs bark and frogs croak, no longer concerned even with drawing applause; they simply can’t help themselves.
I asked a friend of mine, an inveterate punster, whether he punned while on dates. "Sure, I pun on dates," he replied. "On prunes and figs, too." And well he might, considering the similitude between puns and fruit flies, both of which die practically the instant they are born, but not before breeding others.
Except that some puns live on - except that many puns live to inflict their damage on other occasions, either as well-worn anecdotes or set-up jokes. And sometimes they can become infamous, as it the case of one of my faves, offered by Bennett Cerf, one-time head of Random House and author of Bennett Cerf's Treasury of Atrocious Puns. There is even a website devoted to this art form entitled Pun of the Day, from which let me offer just a couple of random examples:
A street musician was carefully watching his whole notes.
He said I was average - but he was just being mean.
Now these exemplars expand the definition beyond that of Addison quoted by Tartakovsky in a fashion that would clearly include my example of "The Queen is not a subject." But I thank Tartakovsky for demonstrating to my spouse that in my delight in this art form, as ephemeral as it may be, I am in august company (even if writing in April) - the ranks of punsters include such notables beyond Shakespeare as Jane Austen (one pun in "Mansfield Park"), Mark Twain, and even Edmund Burke. Tartakovksy closes his piece like this:
With Burkean contrition, I confess that in a Thai restaurant not long ago, following my company’s attempt to order three curry dishes, I suggested that we not get "curried away." Punning, it seems, like every non-deadly sin, is easier to excuse than to resist.
I am not a resister in this case, but more of a conductor - possibly shocking I know (and yes, I am now indulging myself even as I conduct this exercise, musical or not). Thus I enjoy Cerfing (ugh) through the aforementioned pun site I cited, because when I sighted it I found examples not only from the deceased publisher, but others offered in his honor, such as
I once worked at a factory that made boat paddles. The starting pay was ten dollars an oar.
Sometimes a pun simply presents itself. Imagine a supermarket with its own house brands of bread. A couple is shopping. The women holds up two loaves, neither white bread, one cracked wheat and the other sprouted wheated. She asks, "which should we get?" Whereupon the man responds "I'll sprout if you crack."
Or walking back, that same night, across the street to the apartment building in which they at the time resided, which had a circular drive. Being very orderly the female stays on the curving sidewalk while the man takes a direct path towards the front door. She asks "Why do you always cut across like that?" and he responds "because a straight line is the shortest distance between two puns."
Sometimes puns works, and sometimes they do not.
Before, I referred Bennett Cerf. He is the originator of perhaps the most infamous pun of the 20th century. I have not been able to find the original online, but have found many tellings which retain the essential context, the set-up for a punchline known to every devotee of puns. At the time Cerf first offered his version, the understanding of the conceit behind the punchline was well-known, but I do not wish to explicate further than to offer this - if at first you do not "get" it, think of Elliot Spitzer, who in many ways is responsible for this chestnut being roasted once again, even as he succeeded in roasting his own.
This version was the best result of my Cerfing, and was found on the message board at Snopes.com:
A man in Florida had some extra land, so he decided to create an old animal's home. He kept two elderly dolphins in a converted swimming pool, surrounded by a fence, and discovered through extensive research that the dolphins would live forever if they were fed a sea gull each month, so every thirty days, he would drive to the coast, capture two birds, bring them back and feed them to the dolphins.
One evening, after about six months of these missions to capture birds for the dolphins, he arrived back at the refuge to discover that he had left the gate to the Dolphin pool open, and an old, toothless lion was asleep across the entry. Not wanting to disturb the old lion, the man stepped over him in order to feed the birds to the dolphins.
Suddenly, he was surrounded by a circle of bright lights - the headlights of FBI, sheriff, highway patrol and police cars. The sheriff shouted out, "Hands up! You're under arrest. We've been investigating you for six months."
The puzzled man asked, "What are the charges? I haven't done anything wrong!"
The sheriff replied, "You are being charged with transporting gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises."
May you experience the Joy of this day - because if you don't, your sink will be full of dirty dishes.